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Users only care about 20% of your application

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Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#171

Post by yibg »

reinvent42 wrote: post #85

> I often destroyed our home computer when I was a kid. Armed with only 2GB of storage, I'd constantly hunt for files to delete to save space. Many people have a similar experience, but it's amusing that statements like this can roughly indicate your age and the systems you were dealing with... Mine is 40 MB.

For me there was a bit of a step function, where I went from caring about the size of something (number of floppies -> CDs -> HD space limited) to at some point just stopped really worrying about it. Yes a 2GB vs 10GB download time differs but leave it and it's done when it's done. HDDs these days are big enough at least for my (and I would imagine most people's) use. I can see storage being a limiting factor if you have a lot of games or media though.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#172

Post by rbonvall »

michaelt wrote: post #170
hansvm wrote: post #101

At one SaaS I worked at, I spent a day or two on a foolhardy initiative to analyze our users based on the subset of features they actively used (hoping to reign in the complexity of the product to a few core archetypes we could design for, ideally eliminating some of the more annoying features on the way). The results weren't any better than a weighted random choice. Beyond the login page (and even that had a few cus…

> every single person really did have a different 20% they cared about. I have always wondered what would happen if someone had to invent spreadsheets from scratch, today. Would conditional formatting and pivot tables get removed, because only 1% of users use them? Would they feel supporting column, bar, line, area, pie and X/Y charts was just too complicated? That being able to customise the chart styles and colour…

> I have always wondered what would happen if someone had to invent spreadsheets from scratch, today.

This is exactly what Joel Spolsky did:

> What was I talking about? Oh yeah… most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.

... so he went on and created Trello.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#173

Post by taude »

tnolet wrote: post #68

Very true. But then you start selling to Enterprise and everything changes. Because one missing "hygiene feature"* can tank the the whole deal. And every Enterprise has a different one. *like a toilet. It needs to be there. You use it 3 minutes per day. If it is not there, the house is uninhabitable.

I had started writing this in a new thread, then saw yours....

"Unless it's Enterprise users. Then 1000 Enterprises all care very seriously about 2 custom features no one else cares about. You had to do horrible things to your code base to support, that will only kick some poor dev in the face two years after you left, and a year after the customer churned."

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#174

Post by ozim »

radlad wrote: post #162
ozim wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why pushing back on features is important. It is super hard to remove them once they are in. Most of the time it goes way that sales people promise something you build it „because that’s going to be great huge customer” - but after a year or 2 years that huge company moves away because people who originally wanted features moved to other jobs or departments and you are left supporting something some other cust…

The parent comment seems to imply that roughly 1/5 of their user base each used a different 1/5 of the product. This implies that every feature was genuinely valuable in driving revenue - or at least customer acquisition!

That doesn’t mean feature paid itself off if you invest with idea that it will be useful for more than 1/5 of users and when feature brings single customer and is marginally useful for other customers.

Then also you have ongoing costs of maintaining the feature that no one usually accounts for. Even if customer participated financially into creating the feature when they leave you are left with maintenance.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#176

Post by hansvm »

ivape wrote: post #166
hansvm wrote: post #101

At one SaaS I worked at, I spent a day or two on a foolhardy initiative to analyze our users based on the subset of features they actively used (hoping to reign in the complexity of the product to a few core archetypes we could design for, ideally eliminating some of the more annoying features on the way). The results weren't any better than a weighted random choice. Beyond the login page (and even that had a few cus…

Would you consider each 20% to almost be its own utility app (could possibly be a standalone app), or do you think each 20% were simply different workflows for the same app (each user prefers a particular workflow).

The latter thing. One user might use features 1,2,3,4,5, another 1,3,5,7,9, another 2,4,6,8, and a fourth 1,2,3,8,9. Those usages weren't meaningfully disentangleable.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#178

Post by hatthew »

sharkjacobs wrote: post #138

I made a little hobbyist app for myself, and I think it's pretty nice and occasionally think about polishing it up and releasing it. And the first reason I don't is because I'm not interested in promoting it, and it's pretty pointless to release to no one. But the much bigger reason is because I'm not interested in implementing the remaining 80% that I don't use myself.

I made a random 30-line bash script that filled a small but critical niche (reimplementing an existing semi-niche tool to work with ipv6). I am bad at bash, but I put it on GitHub anyways, with a descriptive name.

Occasionally I check in on it, and see it's still getting pageviews, clones, and sometimes forks. A few people raised issues about something beyond the 20% I built, and I say "go do it yourself", and then they do but at least they didn't need to start from scratch.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#179

Post by analog31 »

michaelt wrote: post #170
hansvm wrote: post #101

At one SaaS I worked at, I spent a day or two on a foolhardy initiative to analyze our users based on the subset of features they actively used (hoping to reign in the complexity of the product to a few core archetypes we could design for, ideally eliminating some of the more annoying features on the way). The results weren't any better than a weighted random choice. Beyond the login page (and even that had a few cus…

> every single person really did have a different 20% they cared about. I have always wondered what would happen if someone had to invent spreadsheets from scratch, today. Would conditional formatting and pivot tables get removed, because only 1% of users use them? Would they feel supporting column, bar, line, area, pie and X/Y charts was just too complicated? That being able to customise the chart styles and colour…

Excel probably got a decade of runway thanks to piracy. Businesses were happy to buy site licenses. Individuals were happy with a "free" copy from work. Who would try to develop a stripped down alternative in that market? You can't compete with free.

Re: Users only care about 20% of your application

#180

Post by n0t3ths81 »

rbonvall wrote: post #172
michaelt wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every single person really did have a different 20% they cared about. I have always wondered what would happen if someone had to invent spreadsheets from scratch, today. Would conditional formatting and pivot tables get removed, because only 1% of users use them? Would they feel supporting column, bar, line, area, pie and X/Y charts was just too complicated? That being able to customise the chart styles and colour…

> I have always wondered what would happen if someone had to invent spreadsheets from scratch, today. This is exactly what Joel Spolsky did: > What was I talking about? Oh yeah… most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible a…

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